1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a processing arrangement for web shaped material rolled onto reel before and after processing. More particularly, the invention relates to a processing arrangement for photographic rolled up material, for example a photoelectric scanner for developed photographic films (film scanner).
2. Background Information
In photographic film laboratories, it is common to splice together films which are to be processed to long film webs and to wind these webs onto suited reels to form rolls. The film material is fed to the processing arrangement, for example, a photographic printer, in rolled up form and is after processing once again wound up in the form of a roll.
The processing of the material is thus carried out by roll (batch wise), whereby the normally continuous treatment process must be interrupted more or less long during the change of the film rolls or reels at the input or output side of the processing arrangement. In order to keep these system based interruptions as short as possible, which are especially annoying in modern high performance photo laboratories, very powerful unwind and windup arrangements have already been developed which guide the film contained on an unwind roll fully automatically to the input of a respective processing station and fully automatically guide the film leaving the processing station to an empty windup roll and wind it thereonto. A further reduction of the interruption times has been achieved with the use of so called reel carousels. These reel carousels have two or more receiving stations for full or empty film reels and transport those reel receiving stations, and thus the film reels therein, sequentially into a working position and one or more exchange positions. While the unwind roll is in the working position and the film material thereon is fed to the processing station, the empty film reel at the exchange station can be replaced with a new unwind roll containing film material to be processed. Analogously, while a windup reel is in the working position and takes up processed film material coming from the processing station, a full reel at the receiving station in exchange position can be replaced with a new, empty windup reel. A high performance printer equipped at the input and output sides with such reel carousels and fully automatic unwind or windup arrangements is disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,337,118 (corresponding to EP-B-0 543 069).
The apparatus cost for such reel carousels is relatively high. Furthermore, with the mentioned known high performance printer, the operator must change the film reels in two separate steps at two spatially separate locations of the printer.